I have been "blogging" in some way since sometime in the nineties. I had a few personal webpages from around 1996 to 1999 on various platforms like Angelfire and and others like it. I had a Livejournal blog from 2001-2002, but I made it private and then deleted it after some very personal posts about mental illness and sexuality got posted to some forums I read and posted on.

In 2004, I began blogging again. A few of my classmates in Scott Rettberg's senior seminar on postmodernism and I decided to begin blogging and encouraged each other to really work on our craft as time went on. One of them stopped that summer, another kept at it for a few years, and mine really took off. I loved over to Typepad sometime in August of 2004 and stayed there for a few years until Moveable Type annoyed me enough to want to try something else.

A big influence on my early blogging was Boing Boing. I spent a lot of the fall of 2004 and spring of 2005 trying to blog at least four times a day with links to interesting stories and commentary. Of course, this did not last very long. After the rise of social media, my blogging slowed down and evolved to be focused on posting about projects I am working on and less about the kind of linking and short discussion that, which I have written about before, has moved to places like Twitter.

I had owned my own web domain since 2002, but beyond a basic homepage I had not done much with it. In late 2005 and early 2006, I installed WordPress on that domain and moved over my posts from Typepad during that winter break. My time on Wordpress was pretty quiet for many years. I taught myself CSS by messing around with a install on a sub domain and actively blogged through 2007 and then slowed down a bit in graduate school and then once I began working until last year.

In the fall of 2012, I went to update my blog one day. I left Wordpress open for a little bit while doing something else, but came back, finished typing the post, and hit submit. I got a blank white screen. After many calls to my fairly unhelpful hosting provider, searches on web forums, and the realization that what could have fixed it wasn't properly being backup in my hosting provider’s backups, which they had just a shrug for me about that, I realized it was time to move. I put this off until the summer of 2013 when I would have time to work on a new domain.

So now this domain is hosted via Squarespace. I really like Squarespace and love the new design I came up with off of this template. Hopefully, this domain is a one stop venue for all of the things I am working on.

I attended a great presentation about Omeka by Amanda French sometime in the morning on the first day of ThatCamp Jersey Shore. I have become interested in Omeka recently, as I had been considering moving the flyer archive over to it. After hearing Amanda speak, I have decided not to move it, but i think there are plenty of great uses for Omeka.

Omeka was built for use by museums and archives

Omeka.org is server side software. Must have a server to publish on your own.

The first panel I attended at NJCEA was the Teaching With Technology one early in the day. Julie Cassidy
was the first speaker. Cassidy spoke about requiring students to creat
commonplace blogs for her classes. This is an idea I am going to try and
implement into my courses this fall. Right now, I am thinking of using
Tumblr for this. (see mine)

Klock used to use Youtube in class, but he found the clips were too low quality. He now uses DVDShrink, which I have used in Windows before, and MPEGClipStream to pull clips. Is there a Linux version? DVDShrink doesn’t work too well in WINE.

Klock also incorporates mp3′s of poems into discussion. I am going to start doing that later this summer.

Prof Hacker’s end of semester checklist post
suggested writing some sort of “End of the Semester Roundup” post so I
thought I would write one up. This semester was one of great
advancements for me. I taught my first college level courses and had a
great time doing so. Originally, my schedule involved teaching two
sections of Composition I but during the first week of the semester I
ended up adding a section of Composition II as well.

Comp I was a lot of work, but well worth it. I saw a lot of
advancement in my student’s work as the semester went on. I also saw a
lot if disappointing efforts from others. Teaching writing and grammar
also allowed me to sharpen my own skills and talk about some of the
adventures I have had over the years as a student and academic. Check
out the class weblog for more information.

Composition II was a great joy to teach. I got to teach a lot of my
favourite canonical authors like Chopin, Gilman, and Ibsen. An
unconscious theme of discussing gender and women’s liberation became a
focus of our close readings as the semester advanced through short
stories to plays (A Doll House, Othello) and then to
poets like Plath and Dickinson. Immediately, a handful of students stood
apart from the rest of the class but I also saw many others slowly
begin to contribute more and more as they became more comfortable with
their own close reading skills. My focus in class was on what my
students wanted to discuss. Of course, I would bring lecture notes with
ideas I wanted to highlight. However, after our daily, randomly
selected, journal readers I would ask the class where they wanted to
begin, what they wanted to discuss, and that is where we would start. I
could talk for hours about most of the texts we read, but I am more
concerned with what my students wish to discuss.

One student in particular started the semester off very slowly only
to eventually be the first to raise their hand almost every class.
Another only contributed on Fridays, somehow, but always blew our minds
with their ideas. Almost every student in class had a day where they
stood out and shone brighter than anyone else.

The week of my classroom observation by Dr. Alexander
coincided with my favorite week of the semester: the week we discussed
(post)modern authors like Borges, Coover, and Auster. I was very
impressed with my students and their ability to tackle these difficult
texts. I can’t wait to teach 102 again and hope I get a chance to pick
up a section in the spring. Check out our course weblog.

This semester I ran our course weblogs on WordPress and am thrilled
with the results. I have run WP on a number of websites, including this
one, for the past four years and couldn’t be happier with the results.
In the spring I think I am going to try the dreaded Blackboard for my
classes. As an offsite alternative, I believe I am going to wade my toes
into the world of Drupal as well. I am going to spend some time over
break considering my options.

I also guest lectured for two classes in Dr. McCadden’s upper level
class ENG203 The Origins of Literature. I presented two lectures:
“Telemachus & The Search For the Ideal Son in Classical Greek
Literature” and “The Odyssey & Nonlinear Reading.”

Another project I am going to finish over break is the long-awaited draft of my article on Shelley Jackson for The Quarterly Conversation.
I was supposed to have this completed for the winter issue, but the
hectic nature of the fall semester got in the way. Scott Esposito was
gracious enough to give me an extension. I’m hoping to have something to
him early in the new year.

I have a handful of journal article proposals that I need to send
over break as well. A few of them are spinoff projects from my MA thesis
and others are ideas that I have brewed for a period of time. Hopefully
some of them will be publishable.

in the spring, currently, I am teaching two sections of Comp I. One
is MWF, the other TT. This isn’t the most ideal schedule, but hopefully I
will pick another Comp I, a Comp II, or another class. I am very happy
to have a few weeks off to get some of my work done and prep for the
spring. However, I am also excited to get back to Burlington and begin
teaching again.